We don’t know who they are or where they are. All we know is that some place or other, a shadowy group of powerful Republicans is meeting to figure out how to ban contraceptives.

The Democratic charge that Republicans are somehow working to cut off access to contraception is so ludicrously unfounded that it amounts to an outlandish conspiracy theory. Yet this allegation undergirds the Democratic effort to pass a “Right to Contraception Act” through Congress. Sure, contraception is already legal in every state and no one is trying to ban it, but you can’t be too careful.

The political play clearly is to offer legislation with numerous provisions that Republicans can’t support and then when they vote against it, as all but two Republicans did in the Senate, to say: “See? We told you so.”

The Democratic maneuver generated the desired headlines all over the media about Republicans opposing a bill to protect contraception.
A key piece of the Democratic fear-mongering is that Justice Clarence Thomas said in his concurring opinion in Dobbs that Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the constitutional right to contraception, should be overturned. This doesn’t mean that Thomas is hostile to contraception — only that he thinks Griswold is constitutionally defective.

For the Thomas view to be effected in the real world, the Supreme Court would have to take up a landmark contraception case, which isn’t in the offing; he’d have to get four other votes to overturn Griswold, when that isn’t assured; and the justices would have to not find another constitutional source for a right to contraception, even though Thomas himself held that out as a possibility.

All that said, let’s assume against all expectations that the Griswold decision is rendered a smoking ruins by Thomas and his colleagues. Where in these United States would a serious Republican official propose to restore Connecticut’s Comstock law that prohibits anyone from using “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception”?

Even if Republicans are quietly harboring an intention to do this, they’d be swiftly and decisively rebuked by voters if they ever tried to act on it.

Again, all that is theoretical, not to say utterly fantastical. In reality, even the Trump administration spent roughly $1.8 billion on domestic family-planning in fiscal year 2020.

The source of the GOP opposition to the Democratic contraception legislation is sincere and doesn’t reflect any secret agenda. Republicans consider the bill, correctly, a Trojan horse for radical measures that couldn’t pass on their own.

The legislation would wipe away conscience protections, make it impossible to cut off contraception funding to organizations like Planned Parenthood that provide abortions, and define contraception so broadly that it could cover abortifacients.

With Senate Democrats desperate to make the most of their post-Dobbs political advantage on abortion and related issues, there’s no room for good-faith objections. It’s all demagogy, all the time.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of National Review